The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  There is a left-hand bend with a deserted hut on it. This marks the spot from where you have 1 kilometre to go. When you get to the hut you know you can start emptying it. You dig it out now, out of the saddle, drive it home. Squeeze hard. Because you know it’s not for ever.

  Once you get to the top there is an abandoned settlement. At some stage people thought better about riding up the Madone just to get home every evening. No windows or doors survive and some roofs and walls are all that is left. More ghosts. To the left, some massive antennas.

  There is an old monument at the top of the climb. It is made from stone and old artillery shells and it looks like the Madonna in the form of a bomb cradling a baby. The inscription says ‘Combats de l’homme, éclats d’obus, désormais ne soyez plus que la Madone de la paix’, which reads along the lines of: ‘Battles of men, shards of shells, from now on you are no more than the Madonna of peace.’

  Once you hit the top of the Madone you know it. It descends immediately. You just crest the hill and you drop; there is no flat area.

  We lean forward, sucking in the air, both of us fiddling with our bikes, both of us having the same idea. I scroll through the SRM data from the ascent: Power, Time, Heart Rate, Speed.

  I think a lot about my competitors when I’m training. I think about how they might be riding, and wonder if they are out with their teammates chatting for five hours. Especially if I’m out on my own that day, doing more focused efforts. I’m not just dawdling along. I like to think I’m doing more than the other guys, even when I don’t know if this is the case or not.

  Alberto Contador told me once that he had moved up to Switzerland, somewhere around Lugano. He needed to be close to Bjarne Riis, and the bonus was that another couple of Spanish riders on the team had moved there with him. They were going to be training partners.

  I like to think of those three amigos out training, just having a gentle ride and a chat. Maybe a coffee stop. The more my legs ache when I train the more I hope they are enjoying themselves. If one of them is a bit below par today, maybe all three will pack it in. I hope so.

  In my head I am sure Contador and Nibali and my other rivals are out there training just as hard as I am. So some days I add in intervals or do more specific training or more intensity and tell myself they’d never think to ride like this – this is where I’ll get my advantage.

  Richie and I both struggle when we are told to take it easy; we want to be out there training. Work gives us the reassurance we need. We don’t want Contador thinking of us sipping cappuccinos and talking bull. We are no-pain-no-gain fundamentalists. A lot of the time Team Sky want us to be recovering. If we’ve done a big training block in Tenerife they might say, ‘Okay, guys, take four days easy back at home now before you go to the next race.’

  Richie and I become edgy at the prospect, Richie especially. You have to take his bike away if you want him not to be doing five-hour rides.

  ‘God, four days? We’re gonna get fat in four days! We’re gonna put on a kilo. It’s better if we train.’

  We can’t train though. Otherwise they’ll see that we have been training. So, we have found a way to get past our power meters. If we are supposed to do an hour, we’ll probably do an hour and a half on the power meter, then disable it so it switches off and only shows that we’ve done an hour and a half.

  Meanwhile, the two of us will go on and do more training. We might carry on and do another four hours. Afterwards, we’ll make sure that we have our stories straight when talking to Tim: ‘Oh, today we only did a recovery coffee ride.’

  For us it is important just to keep the body going. Sometimes we imagine that no one really understands this except for us. We worry about putting on weight, about accumulating fluid. We worry that our legs will just stop turning. Training longer gives us reassurance.

  I know that sometimes we do run the risk of over-training, that we need to be backing off. And it’s something I’m learning to deal with. Having Michelle in my life has made it a lot easier. I’m starting to say, ‘Okay, well, Tim has said take a day off. I’ll do something with Michelle.’

  Does that sound bad? Sometimes a day with Michelle is better for me than a day of pain. But pain is still the friend that always tells me the truth. Training is still an addiction. For sure there are days when the pain is overwhelming, where I push into the red so far that I wonder if I will come back. And on those days I speak to my rivals in my head. I can do this. What can you do? I can do this here on my own in training. And when I do it in a race it will be much easier. It will be enjoyable then. Can you do this?

  Training in Tenerife. I got to the 40-second sprint a while ago. Halfway through, at 20 seconds, I was feeling nailed and in deep trouble. When you are sprinting up the side of a mountain, and when the pain owns you instead of the other way round, 20 seconds is a life sentence.

  But then again, it’s not. I thought, ‘It’s 20 seconds. Only 20 seconds. You can actually count that. Why don’t you do that? Come on.’ And I started counting:

  Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen … It gave me something to do, and something to focus on. A voice in my head to talk over the complaints coming from my legs.

  Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen … After about 15 seconds my power started dipping a little, wanting to head towards 600 watts. ‘Stop. I have done this before. Keep pushing a little bit more. Get it back up to 700. Yes.’

  Twelve, eleven, ten … ‘Spit the words out. When I get to the bottom of this countdown it will be finished. Done.’

  Six, five, four … Then I can recover at tempo for 10 minutes, maybe 9.

  Two, one, zero. The big zero. That’s it. That’s it. I imagine a fragmented peloton behind me on the mountain. How’s that coffee, Alberto?

  Maybe I have another sprint in me in a few minutes’ time.

  Today I am working on the interval session on Col d’Eze. It’s perfect, consisting of about 10 kilometres of climb with a very steep section at the bottom to give me a tough start.

  When I get to the top after the intervals I do a small loop and ride straight back down. And then back up again. And then down. And then back up again. I ride for close to three hours doing this with the same loop at the top each time.

  Like at other points in my career, I often train like this on my own. Not many guys would be interested in riding up and down the same road for three hours.

  I’ll upload this session later and wait to see Tim’s response. What will he read into it? He had advised me to do these efforts but I’ve tweaked them as usual, and turned pain into torture. I’m hoping he might say, ‘That’s quite a good idea, you’re getting double compensation there on the climb, you’re really trying to work those recovery systems in your legs.’

  But he may come back and say, ‘That’s not necessary. It’s too early in the year. You don’t need to be doing that much. Just do the one.’

  In which case I’ll stash this morning’s work in the bank of things that I can do, and when I get closer to the Tour I’ll draw on it then, and ramp up the training.

  I’ll say to him, ‘Remember I was doing these things a while back and you said “wait a bit”? Now can I do them?’

  Tim is not one to shy away from pushing on, but there is still a time and a place for it.

  I felt good all the way up the Col de la Madone today. The numbers can tell me just how good. I’m not sure even now if I want to write them down here. The power I managed to hold for that half an hour up the Col de la Madone was the highest I have ever done – 459 watts in a pretty flat line all the way up. The highest in my life.

  There’s definitely something a bit strange with my heart rate. Not only today, but always. It just doesn’t go very high, even when I’m going as hard as I can.

  The heart rate is normally one of the most visible readings on the head display. Sometimes we can be riding a decent tempo up a climb and I will look across and see another rider’s figures hovering around the 180 beats per minute mark. They glance back at m
ine and see my rate is under 150.

  In the morning when I’ve checked it, or when I’m resting, I’ve seen my heart rate down as low as 29. It is a little odd and I’m sure it could be reason for gossip. I mean, I’ll often do my threshold efforts for example between 145 and 150. That’s quite a hard workout, but it’s funny sometimes because there have been a few occasions in a race, on a climb, when someone has looked across at my power meter and almost looked twice at me just to check that I was still breathing.

  My time from the bus stop down below to the summit was 30 minutes 9 seconds. That’s some 36 seconds into Armstrong’s supposed fastest time up here. It’s faster than Tom Danielson’s 30 minutes 24 seconds. If it’s a record though, it is one that a rider would be reluctant to claim. It brings to mind too many thoughts of Michele Ferrari and his clients examining their own stats after a day on the Madone.

  Richie has posted a much faster split time up to the turn for Sainte-Agnès. He started running out of fuel a little towards the end. He did a great time though, about 15 seconds behind me.

  It is a strange feeling we both have after doing it. We feel slightly guilty and a bit sheepish. We don’t want to tell anybody that we have gone and beaten those times because we don’t want to invoke the ghosts of the past.

  I turn to Richie.

  ‘We can’t tell people about this.’

  We don’t want to go there. It’s happened so many times that it stops hurting you and begins to bore you – ‘Hey, you climbed that hill faster than Pantani. Therefore you must be guilty.’

  No more idols.

  We are in good shape but it suits us not to make too much of this, not to be blowing our trumpet before the race and not to be drawing snipers. We are happy. We know what we have done. No need to tell everybody about it. It is great for our morale, our confidence and our faith in clean riding.

  Richie turns to me and says, ‘We’re ready for this, mate. We’re ready.’

  This was 23 June 2013. A Sunday. We would start the Tour six days later.

  26

  Since the 2011 Vuelta I had been talking the talk. Now 2013 was upon us and I would have to walk the walk.

  Nobody else was quite as excited as I was. For the team, this year would be tricky. Everything had been built on Brad in 2012 – he had delivered a Tour de France and an Olympic gold medal and was now literally a knight of the road. This year Team Sky would have to be explaining why last year’s domestique would be the leader in the Tour de France. And Brad would still need to feel fulfilled and challenged.

  All I could do was take care of my own part. Any time the team wanted to check what condition I was in, they should be pleased and no alarm bells should sound.

  Six months’ hard labour lay ahead but that was okay; pain has always been both an enemy and an ally. I had found a soigneur in South Africa, a guy called Stefan Legavre, who had worked with the local pro teams. He was based in Cape Town so I flew him to Johannesburg and put him up in the apartment of the place I had bought in Parkhurst. Jaguar South Africa gave us a branded team car with all the Sky logos so Stefan could follow me on every ride, providing bottles and food and acting as a buffer between me and motorists. This was some change from the days of sneaking out of St John’s at dawn.

  I did huge blocks of training into the Suikerbosrand nature reserve. The longest climb in the reserve is only probably a little under 4 kilometres but very undulating. It tops out at about 1,900 metres. On one part you ride up on to a big plateau and stay up on the top and then drop down on the other side of the reserve. It was somewhere I really enjoyed training and I was always able to look out for animals as I rode along: eland, waterbuck, wildebeest, zebra. Occasionally a fat puffadder stretched across the warm tar. Mischievous baboons and jackals darting out on to the road.

  Team training for the year began in Mallorca and I wanted to make a statement. I wanted to show the team that I was taking the challenge seriously; I wasn’t going to pitch up overweight and unfit. So I worked harder than ever in South Africa.

  Most days I rode on my own. When I didn’t I would ride with some of the local cyclists. If I was doing specific efforts I would go out on my own with Stefan behind. If it was a general training day I’d seek out some company.

  It sounds excessive, having a man in a Jaguar follow you as you train, but it helped. For instance, I could ride the time-trial bike as far as the nature reserve, switch to the road bike for a few hours and then ride the time-trial bike back home again. And there was the safety factor. On South African roads there is little respect for cyclists. In mid January Burry Stander, the mountain biker who had helped Kinjah and myself during the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, was killed on the roads in South Africa.

  One minute Burry was planning his season. The next minute he was gone.

  A few hundred of us took part in the memorial ride for him in Johannesburg. The roads were closed and we did a 10- to 15-kilometre procession on bikes. Even Michelle and Stefan joined in. During the procession, we mounted and chained a ghost bike, a white-painted bike, in memory of Burry, to the top of the iconic Nelson Mandela Bridge.

  I had one night in Monaco to stop and pick up my racing kit. The next morning I was off to Mallorca.

  Things had changed with the team and there were fresh faces as there are every year. Mark Cavendish had moved on, looking for an environment more sympathetic to a sprinter’s needs, and a couple of guys had retired. The cut, that invisible scalpel, had done its work over the winter and now we had new blood. David López and Vasil Kiryienka had joined us from Movistar, along with the two talented but inexperienced Americans Joe Dombrowski and Ian Boswell, and Josh Edmondson, the English neo-pro.

  The younger guys had to deal with the culture shock. Joining Team Sky is like going from a desk job to working in a coal mine. When I arrived they were telling horror stories about some of the training days they had done in my absence – apparently some of them in December had been like full-on race days. I smiled thinly and nodded, doing the old-soldier routine. It was quite funny.

  Bobby J. was gone. The scalpel hadn’t been quite so invisible when the team cut several key staff members as part of the zero-tolerance policy to doping. Those who love trolling about Dave Brailsford and all his Piety in the Sky-ety statements could manage nothing more than a pretty juvenile ‘I told you so’ when staff members came forward and confessed to having been involved in doping in the past.

  Not many people understood that severing those connections on the day of the long knives hurt everybody. Guys like Bobby had made mistakes and now they were paying for them. But so was the team. It was a sacrifice to lose their cycling knowledge as well as their presence about the place. Their past didn’t mean they didn’t understand the mistakes or the wrong they had done to the sport and themselves. It didn’t mean they had nothing to contribute to a cleaned-up cycling world. They were casualties not of hypocrisy but of the fact that cycling needs to rebuild itself and different people have different ideas on how best to do that.

  That was the end with Bobby. I missed him and still do; we had worked well together. I was slightly disappointed in him and very disappointed for him, I suppose. Whatever he had achieved while doping could never mean the same to him as what he had achieved while clean, and that’s quite a punishment for a man who loves the sport so much.

  I would stay in touch on the phone occasionally to see how he was doing and what he was up to, but we had no more contact about training. It wasn’t like it was before.

  I was in more contact with Tim Kerrison now, who was Head of performance at Sky. Tim hadn’t been a rider himself so he brought a more analytical and cerebral approach to the whole thing. I enjoyed that too though, and we would test and challenge each other. I would push on with my instinct that more work is always better, whereas Tim would quietly insist that more work at certain times might be more effective than all the time.

  Cycling has its own conventional wisdoms and Tim has been a beacon in the way
he has challenged them. In South Africa I would sometimes meet up with a big group of riders and tag along with them for a while. However, I would still need to do my 15- or 20-minute intervals so I would ride off the front at pace, complete my intervals and then pull a U-turn, come back and continue riding with them. Nothing was ever said but while I was coming and going I noticed smirks on faces and heard comments back through friends. They were all amused by my antics. ‘Doing intervals in January? What an idiot! This is the time for long steady miles. Always has been and always will be.’

  The point is that the Sky team prepares for the season in its own way. I know that to a certain constituency, those hurt most by the Lance Armstrong business, there is no point explaining what makes Sky different. They say they have heard it all before and they won’t get fooled again. That’s fine. Certain riders and their teams treated the sport and its followers with such cynicism that those followers are entitled to their cynicism now.

  I am not a student of Lance Armstrong or that period in cycling. He doesn’t interest me and that era doesn’t interest me. As such I am no expert on what was done and what wasn’t done. I do know though that a range of cycling people, from South Africa to the seasoned pros in Europe, expressed surprise at how hard Sky went so early in the season. Also, at the time that we spent at training camps at altitude as a team. We came to events like the Tour of Oman prepared to race, and not to prepare for future races.

  At first the peloton disapproved but then it adapted. Last time I was on a training camp in Tenerife the guy in the next room at the Hotel Parador on Mount Teide was a rival pro cyclist – Vincenzo Nibali.

  Tim’s approach has influenced things. I have had lots of lucky breaks along my journey through the people I have met, from Kinjah to Robbie to Bobby. Meeting Tim, who through science reached many of the same conclusions as I had through instinct, was another of those breaks.